The company and tag line and logo and brand colors only exist to call that experience to mind; they do not create it.

Brands can meet that expectation, exceed that expectation … or in the worst cases, fall short of that expectation. In crisis, brands can lose credibility in a heartbeat; but how brands react to crisis often means more in the long run than the crisis itself.

Volvo’s name is synonymous with safety, which makes it the quintessential consumer example.

Cisco’s “Human Network” stands out among business-to-business brands.

Cisco makes products that make it possible for people to be connected, no matter how far apart they may be, geographically. ~Forbes

The Red Cross is a bellwether among nonprofits, with a brand that literally means help is on the way in times of crisis.

The very essence of brands doesn’t lie within your brand colors or site design, even though those are important.

The essence of a brand lies within its meaning. And words have meaning. Words matter.

Volvo’s meaning wasn’t derived from its logo, or even its product design, but by the constant stream of product reviews that published the data on crash tests year-in and year-out.

The brand was built, over time, by third-party validation communicated through third-party content. What other people said about Volvo created the meaning of that brand. The advertising Volvo did just reinforced that meaning.

Every two days now we create as much information as we did from the dawn of civilization up until 2003.

As marketers, we try to convince customers and prospects to generate content about our brands. In other words, to talk about us. To create a Volvo-like experience where the meaning of our brand comes from how others perceive us.

How do we inspire people to generate content? To talk about us on Facebook and Twitter, to increase our audience?

Increasingly, we inspire our customers with brand experiences and by publishing our own content.

The uninitiated customer is no more inclined to mention a brand than talk to the shy person tucked quietly in the corner at a cocktail party. If we want our customers to engage us, or our products and services, we have to contribute to the conversation.

@Frank_Strong , what a fantastic article! I especially love when you say that a brand is a promise, an expectation in experience.

So many people limit the concept to a logo or a slogan! We all know that it's not possible anymore. If you want to be successful, you now have to create a community of advocates. You have to make your audience part of the "dream".

Strong post (no pun intended!). I'm finding that clients and my industry colleagues are coming into a fuller understanding of what goes into a brand. I've not had the "tagline equivalency" conversation in awhile and I agree that the idea of rich, ubiquitous content and 360-degree marketing is responsible for this. To @soulati's comment on who controls branding: it's an open question and tug-of-war betwen departments will kill the brand effort entorely. I believe the changes in the industry will spur a good bit of restructuring inside larger organizations and an expansion of required skills for individuals in smaller organizations.

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[…] it themselves, without a dependency on traditional media. Frank Strong, in a post titled ‘Why Content Marketing is the new Branding‘, rightly states that content is currency. It not only builds perception, but enables us to […]

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Based just outside Atlanta, Georgia, Sword and the Script Media, LLC is veteran-owned public relations agency immersed in the business-to-business (B2B) marketplace. We focus on building consistent, sustainable, repeatable, and process-driven programs for PR, content marketing and social media. A defining difference comes down to our approach – that marketing ought to have utility. This is because marketing that helps, sells better than marketing that hypes.